I would like to comment on the
correspondence concerning the veracity of the late Jan
Karski's claim to have witnessed the extermination camp
Belzec in the Autumn of 1942, and to have brought a message
from from two Jewish leaders in Poland to Polish-Jewish
leaders in exile in Britain.

It is certain that Karski was a courier for the Polish
underground, and that he did come to London from Poland at
the end of 1942 bearing messages from the underground to the
Polish Government-in-Exile.

However, the questions that are still open are:-

Did he actually, in addition to his mission for the
Polish underground, meet with two Jewish leaders in
Warsaw, one Bundist and one Zionist?

Did he actually penetrate the Warsaw Ghetto, at the
suggestion of the above two leaders?

Was he actually smuggled in disguise into a camp
about which many rumours were then circulating among
exile circles in Britain and which went under the name
"Belzec" or "Belzek", and witness what occurred
there?

Did he actually carry a message from the two Jewish
leaders, in addition to the messages he was carrying for
the Polish underground, which was his real mission?

Did he actually report to Jewish leaders in Britain
immediately after his arrival in London?

Investigation of the background to Karski's account given
in his 1944 book "Story of a Secret
State" raises doubts about his claims. His 1944
account seems to have its origin in a report written in late
1942 by the two Jewish members of the Polish National
Council in London, Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart.
This report was sent by diplomatic pouch to the Polish
embassy in Washington, which passed it on to the Jewish
Labor Committee.

The report purports to be an eye-witness account written
in the first person, by an unnamed narrator. It was
published in the 1 March 1943 edition of "The Ghetto
Speaks", a newsletter produced by the US branch of the
General Jewish Workers Union of Poland affiliated with the
Bund, and again in the 1943 book "The
Black Book of Polish Jewry".

The narrator of the Zygielboim/Schwarzbart account states
that only a small number of Jews remain alive out of the
three and one half million Jews of Poland and the five to
seven hundred thousand who had been brought there from other
German-occupied countries, and that "it is not any longer a
question of oppressing Jews, but of their complete
extermination by all kinds of especially devised and
perfected methods of pain and torture".

The narrator continues: "In Warsaw I saw the first part
[of the deportations].and later on the outskirts of
Belzec the second and last part." He says that the first lap
of the journey of the deportees lasts from two to eight
days, and ends at a "sorting point" ("oboz rozdzielczy")
"located about fifty kilometers from the city of
Belzec".

The narrator then states: "In the uniform of a Polish
policeman I visited the sorting camp near Belzec. It is a
huge barracks, only about half of which is covered with a
roof. When I was there about five thousand men and women
were in the camp. However every few hours new transports of
Jews, men and women, young and old, would arrive for the
last journey toward death."

After describing how the guards keep shooting at the
throng, the narrator states that the Jews are crammed into
cattle cars and either left to die there or taken to nearby
Belzec, where they are killed by poison gas or electric
currents. They are only taken to Belzec "because there are
not enough cars to kill the Jews in this relatively
inexpensive manner". The corpses are said to be burned near
Belzec; "thus, within an area of fifty kilometres huge
stakes are burning Jewish corpses day and night".

The question that immediately arises is whether the
narrator of the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account actually was
Karski, or perhaps some other person, or perhaps was
entirely fictional.

One scholar, David Engel, has questioned whether
Karski did meet with Jewish leaders so soon after his
arrival in London ("The Western Allies
and the Holocaust: Jan Karski's Mission to the West,
1942-44", Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5,
no. 4 , 1990, pp. 363-380). He believes that Karski did not
meet the Jewish leaders until months after his arrival in
Britain, since the emphasis of his mission was on the Polish
underground, not on carrying messages for the Jews.

If Engel is correct, then Karski cannot have been the
narrator of the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account, and the
likelihood is that the narrator is fictional, a device used
by the two Jewish leaders to lend urgency and credence to
their account which they may have concocted from a variety
of sources.

Engel's opinion is important, since he discovered and
published an earlier report by Karski, made early in 1940 to
the Polish Government-in-Exile in Angers. This report
details an underground mission to Poland in late 1939, to
determine how the Poles were reacting to both German and
Soviet occupation. It is quite anti-Semitic in some ways, as
it accuses a portion of the Jews in the Soviet-occupied zone
of having betrayed Poland by welcoming the Soviet invader.
In fact, it predicts an eventual bloody revenge against the
Jews by Polish patriots.

Interestingly, in this 1940 report Karski claimed to have
visited a camp at Belzec in
December 1939. This was a transit camp for Jews
trying to cross the demarcation line into the
Soviet-occupied zone. He describes the Jews slowly freezing
in the bitter winter weather, as "red" and "blue".

If Engel is right, and Karski was not the narrator of the
Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart account of December 1942, then it
is entirely possible that the self-promoting account Karski
published in "Story of a Secret
State" is entirely fictional. It may well be that he
took on the role of the narrator, as part of a propaganda
ploy by the Polish Government-in-Exile, and based his story
on the above account, except that he located the camp
supposedly visited in Belzec itself, for dramatic effect. He
may have been led to do so because he had been, or claimed
to have been, in Belzec in December 1939.

It has long been obvious that Karski's account of
"Belzec" differs markedly from that given in establishment
history. Wood and Jankowski try to resolve the
anomalies by claiming that Karski was indeed the mysterious
narrator of the Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart account, and that
he did really visit the "sorting camp" described, which they
locate at Izbica Lubelska, some 40 kilometres from Belzec,
on the railway from Lublin.

The only problem with this identification is that if
Karski had indeed visited Belzec in December 1939, he would
have known that the place he visited in 1942 was not Belzec.
Therefore his location of the camp in Belzec in
"Story of a Secret State" would
not have been merely a mistake, but rather a deliberate lie.
However, one mystery is why Karski, in developing his story
of penetrating the Belzec death camp as used in his book,
entirely omitted any reference to gas-chambers, which had
been mentioned in the Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart account;
after all, by 1944 descriptions of gas-chambers had become
quite widespread.

It should be noted that the Polish Commission's 1946
report on Belzec, published in "German
Crimes in Poland", does refer to a transit camp at
Izbica. It states (Vol. II, p. 94): "A transit camp was
organised in the town of Izbica, from where the Jews were
also sent to Belzec" . However, it does not give any
evidence for the conclusion that Jews from that transit camp
were sent to Belzec, rather than to other destinations.

The above-mentioned 1943 book "The
Black Book of Polish Jewry" contains a second
eye-witness report (pp 331-2) of a death camp stated to be
near Belzec. Wood and Jankowski follow their usual line in
claiming that this eyewitness report is also by Karski;
however, the "Black Book" states that the account was by a
Pole who escaped from Poland in February 1943, so it cannot
be Karski who arrived in London at the end of 1942. The
unnamed Pole states that he visited the Warsaw Ghetto twice,
the first time in October 1942 and the second in January
1943; obviously inconsistent with Karski's claim. He also
says he had "occasion to be in the Concentration Camp for
Jews 12 miles outside of Belzec near Lublin".

This account by an unnamed Polish observer gives a
description of the Belzec camp that replicates many of the
features of the Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart account and also
Karski's account in "Secret State"; most likely it is based
on Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart. The most interesting feature of
this account is that it states that the Jews in the camp
were loaded into trains which headed "north"; the observer
does not know where. He surmises that the cars were shunted
off into a field somewhere and the human freight perished,
their bodies being used for the manufacture of
fertiliser.

Now, if these trains were heading from the camp "12 miles
outside of Belzec" to an extermination camp in Belzec
itself, then the camp outside Belzec must have lain to the
south, since the trains were heading "north". Accordingly,
that camp from which trains carrying Jews departed cannot
have been Izbica Lubelska, which lies to the north of
Belzec, on the railway line leading to Lublin. Conversely,
if this camp lay to the north of Belzec, i.e. near Izbica,
then the trains were moving away from Belzec, toward Lublin;
a train travelling from Izbica to Belzec moves southward,
not northward. It is unlikely that the northward-moving
trains went all the way to Lublin; it is more likely that
they branched off to the east and crossed the Bug River into
the Occupied Eastern Territories, either on the west-east
line leading through Zamosc or on the west-east line further
to the north leading through Chelm.

In any case, the camp outside Belzec, if it is the same
one appearing in the Zygielbojm / Schwarzbart account,
cannot be Izbica-Lubelska since it is in the wrong position.
Accordingly, the Wood / Jankowski attempt to rescue Karski's
reputation by claiming that he was describing a camp at
Izbica Lubelska simply does not hold water.

Finally, it seems to me that although the Zygielbojm /
Schwarzbart account contains a massive historical error in
that it claims that the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto
travelled via Lublin toward Belzec (they actually travelled
north-eastward on the line leading to Bialystok), it
nevertheless has some historical value in that it
demonstrates the existence of largish "Durchgangslager" in
the Generalgouvernment through which Polish Jews were
channelled as part of the process of deportation to the
east. The description as a "sorting camp" is significant;
that implies a place where some sort of selection was made,
perhaps into the 40% of employables, who would continue
their journey to the east, and the 60% of unemployables who
would be taken somewhere to be liquidated, as described in
the Goebbels diary entry of 27 March 1942.

My own opinion is that the Durchgangslager described in
the Zygielbojm/Schwarzbart account was actually located at
Malkinia, the railway junction through which Jews deported
from Warsaw were channelled. That would be consistent with
the map in Wiernik's 1944 pamphlet "A Year in Treblinka",
showing a camp labelled Treblinka (perhaps mistakenly)
situated on the Warsaw-Bialystok mainline.

Michael Mills

Mr Mills is an Australian
civil servant and an expert on the Holocaust.